Every adult lives parallel lives, a surface life of which they are in wakefulness permanently, often painfully, aware, and a life submerged in the perpetual experiencing of a single childhood summer.
Continuity exists in both.
On the surface is continuity of time. Events follow events, creating consequences leading to spirals of cause and effect, which increase chaos and lead ultimately to death, as the universe can hold only a limited number of variations of us at once. Each person is allotted a set amount of complexity. Complexity requires memory. When the memory limit is reached, the universe forgets. Existence ends. The surface life is a life of continuous imperfection blooming outwardly in time from the instant of conception.
In the submerged life is continuity of perfection. Events happen simultaneously and are inconsequential. Time is absent. There is no cause and no effect. Complexity is unknown. There exists only the essence of one ideal summer condensed into a single impression, felt always and forever. Universal memory requirements are low and never increase. The submerged life therefore occurs eternally, like a line from a poem read once and never forgotten.
Most people know only the surface life.
Despite this the two lives are intertwined and one admits the other. In a moment of unexplained happiness, a touch of unexpected warmth in frozen winter or the sudden realization that one can indeed be loved because one has been loved, the submerged life intrudes upon the surface like the crests of waves upon the sea. The submerged life is why, as one ages, one begins to feel a burning nostalgia for a place one does not remember, or remembers unclearly, as the shapes of trees seen through the smoke of a forest fire.
Likewise the submerged reflects on the underside of the surface. That reflection may be felt in summer as a memory of the future, an existential doubt, a confirmation that life tends toward disappointment. Sadness is the sensation of sand slipping through fingers, the felt knowledge that time passes, and that with it we too pass. In every surface life there comes a pinnacle where life splits, becoming the surface, continuing necessarily downward toward non-existence, and the still, submerged life of the endless summer.
However, what keeps us warm in the cold flowing of time, and reminds us, in troubled hours, that happiness has been and thus may yet be again, becomes ultimately a torment, for when the universe forgets, effacing our surface existence, what remains is the summer, in whose unrelenting heat we become wholly submerged. Without the shade of melancholy and regret, joy burns relentlessly. The condensed heat of a quarter-year’s suns scorches us. Our skins peel away like a fruit’s. Our exposed selves boil and burst, and because, in the submerged life, time is not, the boiling and the bursting infinitize. We are always boiling and always busting. Always burning. Always suffering.
We are born into time.
We reach a point of maximum happiness.
Time stops, continuing:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I, —I travelled both, which has made no difference.
The first ended,
and the second led me to Hell.
—Robert Frost, 1915